Relentless busybody fines will radicalise us middle classes - "I’ve long nurtured an almost indecent attachment to the film Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas as William “D-Fens” Foster, a man on the edge of losing his sanity having already been fired from his job. There’s a finely orchestrated build-up of small irritations – log-jammed LA traffic, failed air-con, a store owner who won’t swap a note for change for a phone call and an attempted mugging – before a simmering Foster implodes. I should clarify that the character is no hero (his wife has left him – and for good reason), but rare is the human attempting modern life who doesn’t sometimes feel like going rogue with a rocket launcher. My own mild-mannered husband flipped his “nuclear” switch this week and I almost hurled myself into the reinforced concrete silo with him. The trigger was two unexpected letters from Ulez penalty collectors, although my spouse hasn’t driven in central London for well over 15 years. He did, however, drive to the funeral of a dear friend of 50 years standing in Kent in August. The wake was in a country pub and afterwards he drove the widow and another guest back to the family home in Orpington, where he stayed the night before returning to Cambridge in a state of deep melancholy. The widow assured him that the Ulez charges did not apply to her neighbourhood. But my spouse had committed the grave sin of driving down Orpington’s Station Road. Not once, but twice. The letters both listed an utterly terrifying array of fines. My husband jabbed the figures at me. “Full amount £1,000, if paid within 14 days £500”, escalating to £1,500 in red ink. Or more. “I can’t pay this,” he gibbered, “I’m a pensioner. That’s a grand in total.” “I’m so sorry,” he added. “But you’ll have to pay it.” By that time, both of us were stressed out enough to run amok with a flamethrower. I dashed upstairs to email a friend who works on the outer fringes of the Greater London Authority: “How can this be just or right?” I fulminated. Which is when my husband came upstairs and said he’d read the whole three pages of tachycardia-inducing material and found the small print: the fines were £90 each if you paid early. Even so, £180 is still huge for an impecunious 73-year-old pensioner in a 22-year-old diesel Ford Focus – which was only liable because the meatheads of the Noughties’ Labour government told us diesel cars were better for the planet than petrol ones. “Appeal it, I said. “It’s easy to prove you were at the funeral and distracted by grief. Your civil record is clear and you only strayed inside the Ulez zone for a nanosecond.” Needless to say, my spouse’s pleading letter was flatly rejected. I had to dip into my “repairs account” because my husband is a good, caring and chivalrous man. I feel like sky-diving into City Hall and staging a Mothers for Justice-style tantrum with a custard gun. Nor is this the only unjust fine to hit my family this week. One of my sisters had an appointment at St Thomas’ Hospital. She’d had “a funny turn” earlier this summer and the medics wanted her to wear a heart monitor for 24 hours. She was standing outside by the kerb, fretting and pacing, as she’s also halfway through moving home (try finding an affordable room in London on a bar manager’s wage), when she dropped a cigarette butt. Only for one of the new stealth “enforcement officers” to sneak up and levy a £350 on-the-spot fine. She and I both loathe fag-ends and litter (we were trained to be Wombles by our mother) but if there’s one place I wouldn’t snitch on smokers it’s outside a hospital, where so many souls are at their wit’s end. Also, before you blame the “turn” on her smoking, she’s a gym bunny and a scan revealed her lungs are in rude health. But what truly enraged me about both these stories is the fact we apologised profusely and offered good excuses for moments of aberration. But no one gave a monkey’s, so we lost and paid up like the good, browbeaten, law-abiding citizens we are. (We also know they’ll send the bailiffs round if we protest.) We transferred our hard-earned cash to the bureaucratic blob, while puzzling why on earth we strive to keep our end of the civil compact. Every day you can see young men force their way through tube gates, or dash from shops, arms laden with stolen goods, while the police do zilch. Meanwhile, two years ago, my sister was beaten to the ground and kicked in the head by a mob of feral teenage girls after dismounting from a bus near Victoria station. They appeared to take objection to her androgynous looks, yelling a homophobic slur. The bus driver watched and did nothing, ditto bystanders. She filed a crime report and, apart from a short phone conversation with a police operative weeks later… nada. For all we know, her funny turn could be linked to being booted in the head. This is surely the greatest scandal of our age: the complying, law-abiding and tax-paying are the ones who must pay for every tiny infraction, while those who savage the fabric of society stroll away from any consequences. And it is one which threatens to radicalise the middle classes, who are growing ever wearier of relentless busybody fines issued en masse while the country fractures and breaks. It’s certainly a good thing the only rocket launcher I currently have access to is an ancient toy Second World War field gun, which fires matchsticks."
Anarcho-tyranny strikes again
Airline pilots must go. They’re just too dangerous to have aboard - "The technology for pilotless planes has been available for a long time. It’s not a matter of erratic deep neural networks (or “AI” as they are generally known): this is simple, reliable automation. The task of flying an aircraft, ironically, is easier to automate than driving a car. Large fleets of pilotless aircraft are already operated by various organisations. The technology is perfectly capable of taking off, flying somewhere and landing without any human input. Indeed, it’s relatively rare for most airliners of today to be directly controlled by the pilots. An airline pilot friend of mine has actually said to me: “An emergency isn’t really the time to be flying the plane.” So, given that a solid majority of airliner crashes are caused by the pilots, and there is no actual need for them, it would seem pretty clear that we can hugely improve airline safety by simply not having airline pilots any more. There would surely still be some crashes, just not as many."
France’s youth are fuelling a Catholic revival - "Adult baptisms have more than tripled in a decade, from 4,124 in 2016 to 13,234 this year, with young adults driving the rise. A record 21,386 adults and teenagers were due to be baptised at Easter, according to the French Catholic Church – 13,234 adults, up 28 per cent in a year, and 8,152 teenagers. Church leaders and historians say many seek community and meaning in an angst-ridden world and hope for guidance from the Pope. That partly explains Leo’s expected rock-star reception. Nearly 600,000 have registered for Saturday’s Mass at Place de la Concorde, where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined. A giant white canopy will mark the altar at the site along the Champs-Élysées. That exceeds the 350,000 at John Paul II’s Le Bourget Mass in 1980 and is roughly twice the crowd of 260,000 for Benedict XVI at Les Invalides in 2008, although John Paul drew more than a million in 1997... The increase in young people wanting to be baptised shows a growing trend of Catholicism being consciously chosen rather than inherited. In the early 1960s, 93 per cent of babies were baptised by three months. Today fewer than 20 per cent are baptised even by seven, said Guillaume Cuchet, a professor of contemporary history at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. “For a measure that survived the Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and two world wars, it has collapsed over the past 60 years,” the historian said. Baptisms of children under seven fell from 380,000 in 2000 to around 150,000 in 2024. But there has been a shift towards Catholicism among younger adults. A survey published by the French Catholic Church in March found that 40 per cent of those preparing for baptism had embarked on their spiritual journey following a difficult experience such as illness or bereavement, while 32 per cent reported a powerful spiritual experience. “That shift from Catholicism passed down through generations to one based on personal commitment is probably something that interests the Pope,” said François Mabille, the director of the Geopolitical Observatory of Religion. Philippe Portier, a sociologist of religion at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, said: “In a world in crisis, we need to find our bearings, and the Church can be one of those points of reference.”"
Sacred Mysteries: No bells, no horses for Christians living under Islamic rule - "People sometimes say or even write that Christians at odds with the Orthodoxy of Byzantium welcomed the sudden conquests in the Near East in the seventh century by mostly Arab Muslims. Using primary sources, the historian Sidney Griffith disproved this claim. “Christians of all communities unanimously regarded the conquest as a disaster,” he wrote in 2008. That was in The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, “a work without precedent or parallel” in the words of Prof Gabriel Said Reynolds of Notre Dame. Now Prof Griffith has died aged 87, after more than 50 years opening up a new perspective. “Western Christian thinkers engaged in interreligious dialogue with Muslims in the modern world,” he wrote, “have seldom if ever taken any useful cognisance of the intellectual history of the Christians who lived for centuries in the world of Islam and who wrote Christian philosophy and theology in Syriac and Arabic.” He changed that. From the seventh to the 13th century a new cultural expression of Christian doctrine developed, in Arabic. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque was the first book to study the cultural life of medieval Christians in the Islamic world. Most Arabic sources, Christian or Muslim, divided Christians under Islamic rule into three main kinds, with separate ecclesiastical structures: “Melkites” (who followed the orthodoxy of the Council of Chalcedon), “Jacobites” (after the sixth-century Bishop Jacob Baradaeus, who protected Monophysite Christians), and “Nestorians” (East Syrian Christians accused of following the heresiarch Nestorius). All varieties of Christian found their position increasingly precarious as their numbers dwindled. They lived as dhimmis – protected or tolerated as “People of the Book”, Jews and Christians who had received a partial revelation through the Torah (al-Tawrat) and the Gospel (al-Injil). They enjoyed not even second-class citizenship. A tax, jizya, had to be paid and there were laws on dress, on where dhimmis could live and how they could worship. New churches were forbidden and old ones could not be mended. Church bells must not be rung. Christians must not ride a horse. But a Christian theological tradition in Syriac and Arabic emerged from the Greek tradition of the Church Fathers. It had as much claim to Apostolic status as that of the Latin West. Christian apologists writing in Arabic might even use Islamic terms, such as the “beautiful names” of God, to introduce a concept like that of the persons of the Trinity. In the happiest circumstances of the 9th and 10th century, Christian scholars contributed to the intellectual scene in Baghdad alongside Muslims. Christian philosophers, in a tradition deriving from Alexandria, were at its centre. But Christian Arabic treatises also responded to Islam and rebutted the status of Mohammed as a prophet. They encouraged Christians to resist conversion to Islam, though it offered a gain in social standing. Griffith wrote that “even the friendliest of Christian apologists” of the period saw no sense in calling Mohammed a prophet or calling the Koran divine revelation. He pointed out that Abraham was seen as a dividing point between Jews, Christians and Muslims, never as a sort of common ancestor, as implied by the present-day term “Abrahamic faiths”. He was a historian who favoured reality over wishful thinking."
Weird. We're told that Islam was very religiously tolerant
Polymarket on X - "BREAKING: American man accused of kidnapping Flock camera, "digitally waterboarding" it by subjecting it to 23,040 license plates per second via six 4K monitors rapidly flashing images of plates."
Allie ✞ on X - "The most frustrating part about modern discourse is that it appears to be a conflict of values, but it's mostly a conflict of information Your cousin who's panicking about the Cornell 7 probably has no idea what she's talking about Your friend saying Lindsay Clancy was framed legitimately believes that because she saw it from people she trusts Your dad thinks you are evil for not opposing data centers because he truly believes they will turn the water brown Most people these days have their outrage formed for them by an algorithm and do approximately zero research on top of that -- this happens on both sides, by the way When you're talking with these people you will look like a monster to them because they think you have the same information they do: a college girl was drugged and raped, a mother was abused and framed for murder The vast majority of people are unable to revisit the assumptions that led them there because that would be like a fish examining water To them it is totally and completely true, which means any new information is only an attack On a personal level, please avoid talking politics with people close to you who think this way. It will ruin your relationships"
This slightly misstates the problem - it's ostensibly a conflict of information, but that's driven by the conflict of values, i.e. motivated reasoning. That's how 2 people can read the exact same facts and come away understanding totally different things.
Whitman Republican Club denied affiliation — for being Republican - "Right in its student handbook, Whitman College specifically promises every student freedom of expression and association. So, when members of the Whitman Republican Club sought recognition to become a college-affiliated student organization, they had every reason to expect approval through the same review process as any other group. Instead, the student senate unanimously rejected their application. 25-0. Was it something they had done? Was it something they forgot? No, the record points somewhere else: It was what they believed... It’s not surprising that some or all of the senators found the club’s Republican views offensive. Virtually every viewpoint is offensive to someone. Whitman recognizes dozens of diverse groups on campus, many with missions or purposes that likely conflict with each other or the ASWC: Like Whitman’s affiliated Don’t Eat The Wheat group, who may have some conflicting values with the also-affiliated Cooking and Baking Club. But to deny one club based on its view threatens the same rights of all groups. If dissent leads to exclusion, what happens to any viewpoint that disagrees with the majority? In the past, prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination have protected groups whose views were not popular when they sought to form campus organizations. For example, the principle of viewpoint neutrality protected chapters of LGBT organizations in Arkansas and New Hampshire in the 1970s and ’80s when student senates and university trustees refused to “support a homosexual group” or their expression, which was considered “shocking and offensive” at the time. Using only viewpoint-neutral criteria means that voices that may not be popular can still be heard."
Clearly, college campuses are liberal because all smart people are left wing
My favorite beverage is a 2,000-year-old energy drink from ancient Rome - "The Romans were famed for their innovations in military logistics, which allowed them to extend their territory from Rome and its immediate surrounds to the whole Mediterranean and ultimately, with the establishment of the Roman Empire, virtually all of western Eurasia. But an army can’t win if it’s thirsty. Enter posca. This blend of vinegar and water—and possibly salt, herbs, and other stuff—holds a special place in beverage history thanks to its role as the Gatorade of the Roman army."
Derek Thompson on X - "If you want to have a good time in life, I think you should believe in some conspiracy theories. They're fun. Life is about having fun. But if you want to be right, you should probably have a reflexive aversion to every conspiracy theory you hear. It's not that they're all wrong. It's more that the vast vast vast majority of them are incredibly stupid and don't really survive three seconds' thought (see post below for why it makes no sense for Karen Bass to rig an election to help a stronger candidate against her). More broadly, conspiracy theories almost always assume the extraordinary competency of a shadowy group of elites who are very good at keeping a secret. Haven't the last few decades proved that elites aren't that competent? Everybody accusing Karen Bass of expertly rigging the LA election on Twitter right now also thinks she sucks as mayor. What are the odds that the politician you hate, who you think sucks at everything, is exclusively good at rigging electoral outcomes to make you personally upset? There's more to life than being right, so feel free to ignore the second paragraph. But people interested in being right should be much more reflexively judgmental of conspiracy theories."
Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 on X - "This is why you should only believe conspiracy theories which are
1) VERY fun
2) higher on plausibility
3) don’t make you change your life
For example Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s son"
Meme - joann.blake: "If Democrats ever seize the reins again, the mandate is not healing it is eradication. Lawyer up. Court up. Charge every sycophant, every enabler, every provocateur who carried water, shuffled papers, or whispered obedience-every accomplice. No rest. No absolution. Because if you don't finish the job, the snake sheds its skin and comes back sleeker, meaner, and immune to the last dose."
pm512973: "And I'm curious, what would you charge a republican voter with? It's funny how you call Republicans fascists but yet your post is more fascist or Nazi like than anything Any Republican has ever said or done. And then of course, what happens if the courts decide that your proposal is unconstitutional? What will you do then?"
Meme - reiterpallasch199: "*weaponizes the justice system*
"No they're trying to weaponize the justice system!"
"When we're in charge we must weaponize the justice system!"
Fucking comic books have more nuanced villains than this"
Persecuting your political enemies to the ends of the earth is only an unacceptable violation of norms and dangerous authoritarianism when it threatens the left wing agenda
Meme - *Man smiling in bed with empty place and pillow*
Man waking up: "Cindy?... SHE LEFT ME. FOR REASONS BEYOND WHAT MY HEART CAN COMPREHEND, SHE LEFT ME."
Man hugging pillow: "LEFT ME WITH NOTHING BUT HER SMELL AND MEMORIES OF A LOVE AFFAIR SO CONSUMING, YET SO BRIEF..."
Annoyed woman in bed: "RELAX, ROB, WE DIDN'T PAY HER TO STAY THE WHOLE NIGHT."
Meme - Big Serge @witte_sergei: "Probably the worst thing about drones is that they are ruining the aesthetic quality of armored vehicles by forcing them to wear thick sheets of cable and caging. Once a noble beast, the tank now looks like an unkempt Pekingese."
Meme - Smiling woman with big cucumber measuring it with forearm: "WHATS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING HUNGRY AND BEING HORNY? WHERE YOU PUT THE CUCUMBER"
Meme - "Dilbert Classic April 15, 2004"
Dilbert's Mom: "HAVE YOU MADE YOUR MOTHER PROUD BY BECOMING A MANAGER?"
Dilbert: "NO. HAVE YOU MADE YOUR SON PROUD BY HOSTING A COOKING SHOW ON TELEVISION? YOU COULD CALL THE SHOW "COOKING WITH TOO MUCH SALT.""
Dilbert's Mom: "HOW DID You GET THIS WAY?"
Meme - "Twonks"
Man: "WHAT'S YOUR RING SIZE?"
Woman: "OH MY GOD, WHY?"
Man: "NO REASON *looking at BUTT PLUGS*"
Reference to this
Meme - "Average modern leftist understanding of politics:
Socialism is when government does stuff I like.
Fascism is when government does stuff I don't like.
Capitalism is when rich people spend their money in a way I don't like"
Meme - "The Berenstain Bears: Papa Bear's Not-So-Happy Ending
*Mama bear angrily seeing location at The Pampered Bear Massage Parlor*
*2 kid bears looking puzzled while credit card bill is on table*
Asian woman bear to Papa Bear: "Ok, now turn over..."
First Time Books
More Berenstain Bears Adventures!
Free stickers inside!"
L. Wayne Mathison on X - "George Orwell, Thomas Sowell, Friedrich Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat give you four excellent tools for cutting through Canadian political language.
Orwell: Watch the words.
Sowell: Ignore intentions. Examine results and trade-offs.
Hayek: Be suspicious when politicians think they possess enough knowledge to manage millions of people’s decisions from the centre.
Bastiat: Look beyond what you can immediately see. Ask what the policy costs, what it prevents, and what would have happened otherwise.
Apply those four tests to Canadian politics.
“Affordability” can mean spending more government money, cutting a tax, sending you a cheque, controlling a price or subsidizing something.
Orwell asks: What does “affordability” actually mean here?
Sowell asks: Does the policy really make Canadians better off after all the costs are counted?
Hayek asks: How does Ottawa know the right price, subsidy, industry or investment for millions of different Canadians?
Bastiat asks: What don’t we see? What would taxpayers, businesses and families have done with that money instead?
“Investment” sounds better than “government spending. Fine. Investment in what? How much? Who decided? Who takes the loss if it fails?
“Compassion” describes an intention. It doesn’t tell you whether a program works.
“Fairness” sounds unquestionably good. But fairness to whom? Who pays more? Who receives more? What behaviour does the policy encourage?
“Common sense” is another slogan until somebody explains the actual policy. “Corporate greed” can describe genuine misconduct, but it can also become a convenient explanation that ignores taxes, regulation, wages, competition, monetary policy, supply constraints and government decisions. “Crisis” may describe a real emergency. It can also create the political urgency needed to push through measures that would receive much more scrutiny under ordinary circumstances. “Misinformation” should mean a factual claim that can be demonstrated to be false. It should never become shorthand for “an argument we don’t want to answer.” “Dangerous” tells you somebody wants you to fear an idea. Ask for the evidence.
And when somebody calls an argument “simplistic,” ask them to identify exactly what is wrong with it. Sometimes a simple argument is wrong. Sometimes the complicated language is there because the simple question is uncomfortable.
This applies to Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats, premiers, bureaucracies, CBC, private media, corporations, unions and people on social media.
It also applies to the politicians you like. Especially the politicians you like. Strip away the language and ask:
What is actually being proposed? What will it cost? Who pays? Who benefits? What incentives does it create? What knowledge would government need to make this work? What consequences aren’t immediately visible? What would people have done with their own money and resources instead? What evidence says the policy works? What happens when it fails?
Orwell teaches you to examine the language. Sowell teaches you to examine incentives, trade-offs and consequences. Hayek teaches you the limits of centralized knowledge. Bastiat teaches you to look for the unseen cost.
Put all four together and you have a pretty good bullshit detector for Canadian politics."
Max 📟 on X - "Tucker Carlson: The government of the United Kingdom is punishing and prohibiting people and ideas it doesn't like. Russia's not doing that.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whaaaaaaat?"
Melissa Chen on X - "Tucker markets himself as "anti-war" in the US Any guess as to what happens to Russians who oppose war, just like he does? (None of this justifies the UK's increasingly Orwellian approach to speech but the idea that Russia is a paragon of free expression is laughable)"
Andy Ngo on X - "Update: A Portland, Ore. teen suspected of being a member of the "764" terror cult has been charged with domestic terrorism after a bioterrorism attack occurred at Benson High School—the school I went to. On Sept. 8, an unnamed teen mixed dangerous chemicals in the cafeteria, causing severe injuries to himself and prompting a mass evacuation. The 15-year-old has been charged at the state level with domestic terrorism, 12 counts of attempted m—rder and more. The FBI has been assisting in the investigation. It found references to the "764" cult on devices belonging to the teen. The international p—dophile cult grooms and recruits youths into killing animals, making s—xual content and killing others. I recently reported on the decades-long sentencing of one of the cult's leaders, who is trans. There are members of this cult all over the world, and they've groomed multiple youths into carrying out m—rder-s—icides."
Meme - Kings of A&R: "Haiti's president demanded "respect" for his country, then drank water straight from an pitcher during his speech."
Meme - Hereward the Woke @BamaExpat: "Cambodians have a uniquely flat distribution of educational achievement. I wonder how that happ...oh."
Post-Menshevik @Fullantho: "TIL: Cambodia unique status in PISA"
"The smallest social gradient is found in Cambodia (mathematics 8 points, reading 4, science 4). In this country there is almost "ideal social equality": the performance difference between the upper and lower quarters of socioeconomic status amounts to only 21 points in mathematics and even only 8 and 9 points in reading and science, respectively. By comparison, in Germany the differences are 111, 112, and 121 points. The downside of "social equality": almost all Cambodian students learn virtually nothing. With competency scores of 336 in mathematics, 329 in reading, and 347 in science, Cambodia has the lowest performance level in all domains. In mathematics, 95.6 percent of students do not possess even the minimum competencies required for full participation in life in modern societies; in reading the figure is 97.1 percent and in science 96.2 percent-equality at the lowest possible level."
Left wingers are obsessed with equity, so this is their paradise
Letter: Conservatives aren’t less intelligent - "Singh cherry-picks a few studies, ignoring evidence against his conclusion. For example, Singh cites a study about verbal intelligence — which noticeably measures correlations with right-wing authoritarianism among children, not general conservatism among adults — neglecting to mention that a more recent study finds that those who identify as Republicans have higher verbal intelligence, greater probability knowledge and better question comprehension than Democrats. This study has been corroborated by the further finding that Republicans score between two and five IQ points higher than Democrats on verbal intelligence. Another study found that those who identified as center-right had the highest IQ, controlling for gender, age, education and income. Finally, a 2021 meta-analysis concluded that economic conservatives have higher cognitive ability. Nevertheless, it would be foolish and overconfident to assert based on these findings that Republicans are more intelligent than Democrats, and I don’t think that’s true either. Effects are small in either direction, and it is a notoriously flawed method to make causal inferences from correlations, yet this is exactly what Singh does."
Kaja Kallas on X - "The ICC is the cornerstone of the international criminal justice system. It prosecutes individuals responsible for the most serious crimes under international law. I have spoken with ICC President Tomoko Akane following the United States’ announced intention to impose sanctions. The six-month period before the measures take effect offers a window for dialogue. The EU has always supported the Court, and the EU has options to ensure that it can continue its vital work. Protecting the ICC remains an EU priority."
Ribeiro on X - "This is nonsense. The ICC did not go after Assad or the leaders of Saudi Arabia for their crimes in Syria and Yemen, respectively. It also did not go after the Chinese leaders for their crimes against the Uyghurs. It's a court that's targeting citizens of countries that have sound legal systems and, as such, should be reformed or dismantled."
